Iran's Axis of Nuclear Evil

I report and link. You decide. - BJon

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7

From a Wall Street Journal article, Iran's Axis of Nuclear Evil:

Iran's Axis of Nuclear Evil [/] By JOHN BOLTON [/] Saturday, March 21, 2009

While President Obama's unanticipated Nowruz holiday greeting to Iran generated considerable press attention, his video wasn't really this week's big news related to the Islamic Republic.

Far more important was that a senior defector -- Iran's former Deputy Minister of Defense Ali Reza Asghari – disclosed Tehran's financing of Syria's nuclear weapons program. That program's centerpiece was a North Korean nuclear reactor in Syria. Israel destroyed it in September 2007.

At this point, it is impossible to ignore Iran's active efforts to expand, improve and conceal its nuclear weapons program in Syria while it pretends to "negotiate" with Britain, France and Germany (the "EU-3"). No amount of video messages will change this reality. The question is whether this new information about Iran will sink in, or if Washington will continue to turn a blind eye toward Iran's nuclear deceptions.

That the Pyongyang-Damascus-Tehran nuclear axis went undetected and unacknowledged for so long is an intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. It represents a plain unwillingness to allow hard truths to overcome well-entrenched policy views disguised as intelligence findings.

Key elements of our intelligence community (IC) fought against the idea of a Syrian nuclear program for years. In mid-2003, I had a bitter struggle with several IC agencies -- news of which was leaked to the press -- concerning my testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the Syrian program. Then Sen. Joe Biden made the Syria testimony an issue in my 2005 confirmation battle to become ambassador to the United Nations, alleging that I had tried to hype concern about Syria's nuclear intentions. (In fact, my testimony, in both its classified and unclassified versions, was far more anodyne than the facts warranted.)

Key IC agencies made two arguments in 2003 against the possibility of a clandestine Syrian nuclear weapons program. First, they argued that Syria lacked the scientific and technological capabilities to sustain such a program. Second, they said that Syria did not have the necessary economic resources to fund a program. [/] These assertions were not based on highly classified intelligence. Instead, they were personal views that some IC members developed based on public information. The intelligence that did exist -- which I thought warranted close observation of Syria, at a minimum -- the IC discounted as inconsistent with its fixed opinions. In short, theirs was not an intelligence conclusion, but a policy view presented under the guise of intelligence.

How wrong they were.

As for Syria's technical expertise, North Korea obviously had the scientific and technological ability to construct the reactor, which was essentially a clone of the North's own at Yongbyon. Moreover, it is entirely possible that Syria's nuclear program -- undertaken with Pyongyang's assistance -- is even more extensive. We will certainly never know from Syria directly, since Damascus continues to deny it has any nuclear program whatever. It's also stonewalling investigation efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency. [/] As for Syria's ability to finance a nuclear program, Iran could easily supply whatever Syria might need -- even in a time of fluctuating oil prices. Moreover, given Iran's hegemony over Syria, it is impossible to believe Syria would ever undertake extensive nuclear cooperation with North Korea without Iran's acquiescence. Iran was likely an active partner in a three-way joint venture on the reactor, supplying key financial support and its own share of scientific knowledge. Cooperation on ballistic missile programs between Pyongyang and Tehran is longstanding and well-advanced, and thereby forms a basis of trust for nuclear cooperation. Moreover, both Iran and North Korea share a common incentive: to conceal illicit nuclear weapons programs from international scrutiny. What better way to hide such programs than to conduct them in a third country where no one is looking?

Uncovering the North Korean reactor in Syria was a grave inconvenience for the Bush administration. It enormously complicated both the failing six-party talks on North Korea and the EU-3's diplomatic efforts with Iran, which Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice so actively supported.

Mr. Asghari's revelations about Iranian financing of Syria's nuclear program -- if borne out – will have precisely the same negative impact on Obama administration policies, since they track Mr. Bush's so closely. In fact, the two administrations' approaches differ only to the extent that Mr. Obama is poised to pursue policies, like face-to-face negotiations with Iran, that the second term Bush State Department wanted to do, but faced too much internal dissonance to implement.

The Nowruz video reflects the dominant view within the Obama administration that its "open hand" will be reciprocated. It's likely Iran will respond affirmatively to the near-plaintive administration request to "engage." [/] And why not? Such dialogue allows Iran to conceal its true intentions and activities under the camouflage of negotiations, just as it has done for the past six years with the EU-3. What's more, Iran will see it as confirmation of U.S. weakness and evidence that its policies are succeeding.

There is very little time for Mr. Obama to change course before he is committed to negotiations. He could start by following Iran's money trail.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007). [My ellipses and emphasis]

Barack Obama and Alinsky's Rules for Psychopaths

I report and link. You decide. - BJon

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7

From an American Thinker .com article, Barack Obama and Alinsky's Rules for Psychopaths:

Barack Obama and Alinsky's Rules for Psychopaths [/] By James Lewis [/] September 25, 2008

"... the community organizer ... must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.' [/] -- Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

"THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT --- An analysis of the Alinsky Model." [/] -- Hillary Clinton, BA Honors Thesis, Wellesley College, 1969.

"(Barack) Obama worked in the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky, who made Chicago the birthplace of modern community organizing...." [/] -- The Nation

A psychopath is a person without conscience; someone who constantly breaks the moral rules of the community. Saul Alinsky was a "community organizer" who found a career that fit that personality disorder. In the Orwellian upside-down world of the Left, community organizers disorganize communities. That is the meaning of revolution, to overturn whatever exists today in the raw pursuit of one's own power.

Alinsky boasted about his close alliance with Frank Nitti, Al Capone's second in command in the Chicago Mob during the 1930s. Al Capone's Mob were domestic terrorists, and not for any noble cause either. They poisoned the Chicago politics of their era. Alinsky's close alliance with Frank Nitti tells us something crucially important today. Alinsky was also a lifelong ally of the Stalin-controlled Communist Party, at a time when Stalin was known to have murdered tens of millions of people. He was proud of building a bridge between organized crime and the power hungry Left. That tacit alliance may continue today.

Alinsky's personality fits the definition of a psychopath -- someone who has no guilt or shame toward others. But Alinsky also discovered how to teach psychopathic behavior to college students. That is the key to his success: To persuade hundreds of thousands of ignorant young people that it is much more moral to be immoral. Or, as Bill Ayers famously said, "Bring the Revolution home; kill your parents."

Bill Ayers is now a highly influential professor of education. That is not an accident; it reflects a deliberate program of radical agitation and propaganda through the school systems. If you want to know who brought down American education, Bill Ayers is part of the answer.

A lot of the Boomer Left is marked by psychopathic behavior, in politics and in the rest of life. That is why the actions of the Left are so shocking to many of us.

Alinsky's disciples -- including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- have a warlike political style. They learned politics as war from the Master. Obama is so well-trained in Alinsky tactics that he used to teach workshops on it. That is why Obama can knowingly violate Federal law against usurping the presidential power to negotiate with Iraq before ever getting elected. Actual election to head of state by the voters means nothing, just as it means nothing to Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, who have negotiated with Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood in clear violation of law while serving in Congress.

Teaching hatred for the normal majority is the key to power for radicals. But Alinsky taught that you can't easily hate millions of people. To do that effectively you need a one-person scapegoat to focus all your hatred on. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." That is the politics of personal destruction, and it doesn't matter if the target is black like Clarence Thomas, or a woman like Sarah Palin, or a severely wounded war veteran like John McCain.

That is why Obama is now instructing his followers to "get in their faces" of those Americans who are not down for his cause. Obama acts like a nice guy, but he is a political warmonger. He's been very clear about that: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." That's the language of gang war.

Today we can see the Left's rage reaction to John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin. The New York Sun quoted one feminist saying "All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows ...People were flipping out. ... Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president -- our potential next president." [/] The "comedienne" Sandra Bernhard suggested that Sarah Palin would be "gang-raped by blacks in Manhattan" if she dared to go there.

A British Leftist writing for Pravda (!) called "Sarah Palin - The Devil in disguise... [/]

Sarah Palin, Mrs. Nobody know-it-all shreiking cow from Alaska, the joke of American politics, plied with a couple of vodkas ... cheap little guttersnipe ... suppose you shut up ... you pith-headed little bimbo from the back of beyond ... So next time suppose you keep your mouth shut and while you're at it, make sure the members of your family keep their legs shut too. ... "

That warlike rage has been systematically whipped up over decades by the Left. That's what college "Women's Studies" does, just as "Black Studies" is deliberately designed to whip up black rage and victimhood. Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis is a case in point.

Alinsky called ordinary Americans "the enemy." Normal people don't declare war on all of society. But Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals that radicals

"...have contemptuously rejected the values and way of life of the middle class. They have stigmatized it as materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized and corrupt ... They are right ... "

Normal, decent America is the enemy for these people. Obama and Hillary are lifelong followers of Alinsky. They use his tactics and ideology. That is why American politics became the politics of personal destruction when the Boomer Left came to power.

These claims require proof; but we have been looking straight at the evidence since the first Clinton term. Bill Clinton fits the diagnostic description of psychopathic personality, now relabeled "antisocial personality' in the DSM IV, the official diagnostic manual for psychiatry. Three out of the following seven criteria nails the diagnosis:

1. Failure to conform to social norms ... [/] 2. Deceitfulness ... or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; [/] 3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; [/] 4. Irritability and aggressiveness ... ; [/] 5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others; [/] 6. Consistent irresponsibility ... ; [/] 7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

I would give Mr. Clinton credit for Numbers 1, 2, 6, and 7, and possibly 3 (impulsivity) and 4 (irritability and aggressiveness). Dick Morris, who advised the Clintons for 20 years, describes dramatic scenes that certainly fit the description. Or Bill's inability to stick with a meeting agenda, impulsively running endless bull sessions at the White House. As for 5, his picking up women opportunistically and in a way that put his career, not to mention his family life and American security, at risk. The Monica affair showed an impulsive, reckless president who got into power by endless lying and conning.

Liberal Democrats used to be normal Americans before the Boomer Left rose to power. Hubert Humphrey and Harry Truman had a strong sense of American morality. They despised the Stalinist Left and fought to keep them out of the Democrat Party. They were sensitive to ordinary shame and guilt, the emotions that make us civilized. When Bob Dole asked "Where is the shame?" in the 1996 presidential election, the answer came out: Not in the modern Democrat Party. People without guilt or shame make merciless power mongers.

Normal people slow down in School Zones where kids might run across the street -- not because they're afraid of getting a speeding ticket but because they can't stand the thought of hurting kids. They don't need to cheat compulsively on wives and husbands to prove how irresistible they are. Normal people have internalized some modesty and humility, and are capable of respect and love for others. A common feature of psychopaths is the inability to feel authentic love and respect for others.

True psychopaths are often charming, seductive, and treacherous. They make natural con artists. Many psychopaths are extremely manipulative -- and what is more manipulative than stirring up hatred among victim groups to empower oneself? That is Jeremiah Wright, the diabolical Father Pfleger, James Meeks, and by his own definition of radicals, Saul Alinsky.

The worst are "malevolent psychopaths" -- people who sadistically hurt others. Hitler and Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot, and probably many famous Western intellectuals fit the description of malevolent psychopaths. That is tragic and shocking. Historian Paul Johnson presents compelling evidence for malevolent psychopathy in the life of Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, and many others in his important book Intellectuals. Western intellectuals have been the home team of Leftist radicalism for a century now.

But the single most important point about Alinsky's "community organizing" strategy is that normal people can be trained to act like psychopaths: To become convinced that a "higher morality" allows them to act without conscience. As Alinsky wrote admiringly about V.I. Lenin, well known as a large-scale murder leader:

"Lenin was a pragmatist; ... he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot box but would reconsider after they got the guns!" [/] That is a laugh line, believe it or not.

Alinsky called this "pragmatic radicalism." He differed from his Communist friends only in being more practical and less ideological. Alinsky was a radical because it suited his personality, because it was fun, brought him power and influence, and made him feel good. He was very clear in saying that, and he inspired the Boomer Left to follow his lead.

Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals: [/] "... to the very first radical . . . who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer."

If that doesn't send a shiver down your back, you haven't been paying attention. [/] James Lewis occasionally blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com [My ellipses and emphasis]

Thank God America Isn't Like Europe -- Yet

Wisdom in the Washington Post?!? Will wonders ever cease?!?

I report and link. You decide. - BJon

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God. - Psalms 20:7

From a Washington Post article, Thank God America Isn't Like Europe -- Yet:

Thank God America Isn't Like Europe – Yet [/] By Charles Murray [/] Sunday, March 22, 2009; [Page] B02

Do we want the United States to be like Europe? [/] The European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted whenever I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. There's a lot to like -- a lot to love -- about day-to-day life in Europe. But I argue that the answer to this question is "no." Not for economic reasons. I want to focus on another problem with the European model: namely, that it drains too much of the life from life.

The stuff of life -- the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships – occurs within just four institutions: family, community, vocation and faith. Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. The European model doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Drive through rural Sweden, as I did a few years ago. In every town was a beautiful Lutheran church, freshly painted, on meticulously tended grounds, all subsidized by the Swedish government. And the churches are empty. Including on Sundays. The nations of Scandinavia and Western Europe pride themselves on their "child-friendly" policies, providing generous child allowances, free day-care centers and long maternity leaves. Those same countries have fertility rates far below replacement and plunging marriage rates. They are countries where jobs are most carefully protected by government regulation and mandated benefits are most lavish. And with only a few exceptions, they are countries where work is most often seen as a necessary evil, and where the proportions of people who say they love their jobs are the lowest.

Call it the Europe Syndrome. Last April I had occasion to speak in Zurich, where I made some of these same points. Afterward, a few of the 20-something members of the audience came up and said plainly that the phrase "a life well-lived" did not have meaning for them. They were having a great time with their current sex partner and new BMW and the vacation home in Majorca, and they saw no voids in their lives that needed filling.

It was fascinating to hear it said to my face, but not surprising. It conformed to both journalistic and scholarly accounts of a spreading European mentality that goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.

If that's the purpose of life, then work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with the higher good of leisure. If that's the purpose of life, why have a child, when children are so much trouble? If that's the purpose of life, why spend it worrying about neighbors? If that's the purpose of life, what could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

I stand in awe of Europe's past. Which makes Europe's present all the more dispiriting. And should make it something that concentrates our minds wonderfully, for every element of the Europe Syndrome is infiltrating American life as well. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.

Yet not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, I predict that 21st-century science is going to explain why. A tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes humans tick is coming, and it will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. As Harvard's Edward O. Wilson argues in his book "Consilience," the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of science. It's already happening. Whether it's psychologists discovering how fetal testosterone affects sex differences in children's behavior or geneticists using haplotypes to differentiate the Dutch from the Italians, the hard sciences are encroaching on questions of race, class and gender that have been at the center of modern social science. And the tendency of the findings lets us predict with some confidence the broad outlines of what the future will bring.

Two premises about human beings are at the heart of the social democratic agenda: what I label "the equality premise" and "the New Man premise." The equality premise says that, in a fair society, different groups of people -- men and women, blacks and whites, straights and gays – will naturally have the same distributions of outcomes in life -- the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and who become CEOs. When that doesn't happen, it is because of bad human behavior and an unfair society. Much of the Democratic Party's proposed domestic legislation assumes that this is true.

I'm confident that within a decade, the weight of the new scientific findings will force the left to abandon the equality premise. But if social policy cannot be built on the premise that group differences must be eliminated, what can it be built upon? It can be built upon the premise that used to be part of the warp and woof of American idealism: People must be treated as individuals. The success of social policy is to be measured not by equality of outcomes for groups, but by the freedom of individuals, acting upon their personal abilities, aspirations and values, to seek the kind of life that best suits them.

The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise -- which says that human beings are malleable through the right government interventions -- is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise observers have thought for thousands of years.

The effects on the policy debate will be sweeping. Let me give you a specific example. For many years, I have been among those who argue that the growth in births to unmarried women has been a social catastrophe -- the single most important force behind the growth of the underclass. But while other scholars and I have been able to prove that other family structures have not worked as well as the traditional family, I cannot prove that alternatives could not work as well, and so the social democrats keep coming up with the next new program that will compensate for the absence of fathers.

Over the next few decades, advances in evolutionary psychology are going to be conjoined with advances in genetic understanding, and I predict that they will lead to a scientific consensus that goes something like this: There are genetic reasons why boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence unsocialized to norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs. We will still be able to acknowledge that many single women do a wonderful job of raising their children. But social democrats will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.

For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: The 20th century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human life that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way adolescents react when they think they have discovered that Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. It was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas was no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, then the Nicomachean Ethics had nothing to teach us.

The nice thing about adolescence is that it is temporary, and when it passes, people discover that their parents were smarter than they thought. I think that may be happening with the advent of the new century. All of us who deal in social policy will be thinking less like adolescents, entranced with the most titillating new idea, and more like grown-ups. But that will not stop America's slide toward the European model. For that, there must be a kind of political Great Awakening among America's elites. They will have to ask themselves how much they value what has made America exceptional, and what they are willing to do to preserve it.

The trouble is that American elites of all political stripes have increasingly withdrawn to gated communities -- literally or figuratively -- where they never interact at an intimate level with people not of their own socioeconomic class. Over the last half-century, the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, and never having had a close friend who hadn't gotten at least 600 on her verbal SAT.

America's elites must once again fall in love with what makes America different. The drift toward the European model can be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious. [/] Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from his 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture. [My ellipses and emphasis]

POLL BJon Blame Fritzl’s Mother For His Horrendous Abuse Of His Daughter?

(Josef Fritzl was recently sentenced to life in a psychiatric facility for imprisoning and massively abusing his children and grandchildren for twenty-four years.)

See article below, and: Vote! Make your opinion (or lack thereof) count!! Vote at Adult Christian Forum Thread 139419!!!. (Choices and link also given after article below.)

Why did Fritzl feel the need to dominate someone to such a degree? [/] Time and again, in his jail cell and in court this week, he has cited the influence of his mother, a woman of stern principles and iron discipline, whom he claims forbade him to have friends and sought to 'protect' him from the wild, wicked world outside. [/] 'My mother used to stop me having friends,' he told the court. 'I was not allowed to have any until I was 12. [/] 'I did manage to have one secret friend, but the friend bitterly let me down. I decided not to have any friends after that.'

Thinking, as he must have, that his mother loved him, he submitted himself completely to her will. Ever afterwards his notion of love was perverted. [/] For him, it meant an expression of absolute power - and recipients of this love would be expected to demonstrate unquestioning acquiescence. [/] Normal human relationships are utterly impossible for a man with such convictions. [/] People are not robotic and predictable, as he would like them to be; they are messy and surprising. They do not respond according to the rules. They do not fit with our preconceived ideas of what they should say or do.

[...] A control sadist like Fritzl, who is inherently terrified of this unpredictability, will create a different universe in which nobody says no, and nobody upsets the order which he imposes by his own will. [/] Fritzl did so in a literal sense, by building an airless and lightless dungeon beneath his house, and leading his second, secret fantasy-life inside it - a life he also shared with other living souls whom he reduced to objects he could manipulate.

That is the reason why he did not speak to Elisabeth for years and years, but always copulated in silence. [/] If he spoke, then she might reply, and that was dangerous, for it would remind him - and declare to herself too - that she was human and not an object or a thing required for his pleasure. It was essential for Fritzl that she should be deprived of vitality and reduced to an object, and for this to happen she had to be voiceless. [/] Literally, she was the living dead - which explains my nauseous sense that there are worse things than murder, and why we all shudder with contempt for this man and what he has done with his own offspring.

From a Daily Mail [U.K.] article, What kind of human being can this be?, more follows:

What kind of human being can this be? [/] By Brian Masters [/] Last updated at 1:27 PM on 18th March 2009

For more than 25 years now, I have pondered, examined and attempted to comprehend some of the most baffling and sordid cases of serial murder. [/] I wrote a biography of serial killer Denis Nilsen, and covered the trial of Rosemary West. [/] But the Josef Fritzl case makes me wonder if there are not degradations of the soul more deeply squalid even than murder.

This man did not kill his daughter; but he did take her life while she remained living, thus condemning her to be witness to her own obliteration. [/] He is said to have raped her up to 3,000 times over 24 years - mechanically, indifferently, and in front of other members of his incestuous family in the cellar. He is said not to have addressed a word to her for the first nine years of her ordeal. [/] All this is unimaginably cruel, and yet we must consider what makes a man descend to such wickedness?

It is no good merely to weep and wail: for the sake of our own humanity, we are obliged to work out what manner of a man this is. [/] […] [/] But it is not the sadism which looks for gratification simply in the infliction of pain and contemplation of suffering; it is the sadism of blind selfishness.

Fritzl was determined to have his way at all costs. He was determined not to be thwarted; nor to be challenged or resisted. He even used the word 'kingdom' to describe his ghastly dungeon. Only he could enter his domain, and those inside were subjected to his terrifying rule. [/] Grotesque though it is to contemplate, we can hardly be surprised that his obsessive urge to exert control without any fear of reprisal led to incest. [/] For what weaker victim is there than your own child, who not only would be too frightened to argue, but would also be inclined to assume that all was as it should be, since it is the child's wish to trust?

As Elisabeth Fritzl emerged from childhood into puberty and adolescence, she would have realised the desperate trap into which she had been enticed by a father who so appallingly abused her innocence and trust. [/] But by then she would also have come to accept that it was too late to do anything but subject herself to his relentless abuse. Her thoughts must truly have been of blackest despair, that her tormentor was the one man on Earth she had once believed was inherently responsible for her happiness. […] [My ellipses and emphasis]

Poll Question: Blame Fritzl’s Mother For His Horrendous Abuse Of His Daughter? | Poll choices:

1. Yes. Visiting iniquity upon descendents. / 2. Yes. Freud was right. / 3. Yes. Fritzl permanently crippled emotionally. / 4. Yes. Extremely evil woman. / 5. Yes. Extremely misguided woman. / 6. Yes. Mother’s parents also to blame. / 7. Yes. All or most of 1-6 above. / 8. Yes. / 9. Possibly. Fritzl may be lying. / 10. Possibly. Not much known about her. / 11. Possibly. Father, others may be more to blame. / 12. Possibly. / 13. No. / 14. No. The wickedness of the wicked is upon him. / 15. No. She did what she could. / 16. No. Freud was wrong. / 17. No. Law of mother not to be kept. / 18. No. His insanity of unknown origin. / 19. No opinion. Important issues deserve much study. / 20. No comment. / 21. No opinion. / 22. This poll is worthless. / 23. This poll is of negative value. / 24. Other.

Vote at Adult Christian Forum Thread 139419! Vote!! Make your opinion (or lack thereof) count!!!